--- title: 'Week 5: Advertising' author: "Ethan Jasny" date: '2022-10-09' slug: [] categories: [] tags: [] ---
This blog is an ongoing assignment for Gov 1347: Election Analytics, a course at Harvard College taught by Professor Ryan Enos. It will be updated weekly and culminate in a predictive model of the 2022 midterm elections.
This week, I’ll be trying to answer one central question: does advertising in midterm elections predict the results of congressional elections? As we don’t yet have access to 2022 advertising data, I won’t be able to make a prediction for 2022 districts. But I will put together a model that assesses the predictiveness of advertising on congressional election results.
Before constructing a model, I will first consider where political parties target their advertising. The map below plots the number of ads run supporting Democrats in House races in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections.
The map below plots the number of ads in favor of Republican candidates.
Clearly, Republicans and Democrats tend to run ads in many of the same districts. This makes sense — both parties attempt to buy ads in the most competitive districts, while neither party believes it’s worthwhile to spend money in safe Republican and safe Democratic districts. In fact, the map below plots the races considered to be competitive in the run-up to the 2018 election, according to the Cook Political Report. Red districts lean Republican, blue districts lean Democratic, and purple districts are toss-ups. All other grey districts are either considered likely Republican/Democratic or solid Republican/Democratic, and are thus noncompetitive.